Reinventing Performance Management

Article from Harvard Business Review by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall

Some pointers that I've got are:

On fueling performance

1. Research into the practices of the best team leaders reveals that they conduct regular check ins with each team member about near term work. These brief conversations allow leaders to set expectations for the upcoming week, review priorities, comment on recent work, and provide course correction, coaching, or important new information.

2. The conversations provide clarity regarding what is expected of each team member and why, what great work looks like, and how each can do his or her best work in the upcoming days - in other words, exactly the trinity of purpose, expectations and strengths that characterise our best teams.

3. Our design calls for every team leader to check in with each team member once a week. For us, these check ins are not in addition to the work of a team leader; they are the work of a team leader. if a leader checks in less often than once a week, the team member's priorities may become vague and aspirational, and the leader can't be as helpful, and the conversation will shift from coaching for near term work to giving feedback about past performance.

4. In other words, the content of these conversations will be a direct outcome of their frequency: If you want people to talk about how to do their best work in the near future, they need to talk often. And so far we have found in our testing a direct and measurable correlation between the frequency of these conversations and the engagement of team members. Very frequent check ins are a team leader's killer app.

5. That said, team leaders have many demands on their time. We've learned that the best way to ensure frequency is to have check ins be initiated by the team member - who more often than not is eager for the guidance and attention they provide - rather than by the team leader.

6. To support both people in these conversations, our system will allow individual members to understand and explore their strengths using a self assessment tool and then to present those strengths to their team mates, their team leader, and the rest of the organisation. Our reasoning is twofold. First, as we've seen, people's strengths generate their highest performance today and the greatest improvement in their performance tomorrow, and so deserve to be a central focus. Second, if we want to see frequent use of our system, we have to think of it as a consumer technology - that is, designed to be simple, quick, and above all engaging to use. Many of the successful consumer technologies of the past several years (particular social media) are sharing technologies, which suggest that most of us are consistently interested in ourselves - our own insights, achievements, and impact. So we want this new system to provide a place for people to explore and share what is best about themselves.

Yours,
Something Small Thinking Big